ABOUT

John C. Gregory, 1979

John C. Gregory in Studio c. 1969

John C. Gregory

John C. Gregory [aka Jack Gregory] (1930-2014) was an abstract painter who attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (now the University of the Arts) in the early 1950s. He worked steadily in Philadelphia until the mid 90’s, after which he was based in Natick, Massachusetts.

An innovative experimenter with line, balance, color and media, Gregory made work that spans diverse, dynamic styles. This site offers visitors an opportunity to track the development of a talented, dynamic and thoughtful artist across his productive career. Gregory worked in a wide variety of media and sizes, including paintings and portrait sculpture, along with works on paper. The range of media includes enamels, casein, acrylic, oil and gouache on paper and canvas, as well as wood and clay. His pieces range in size from 10” x 14” to 8’ x 10’.

Starting with 1950s representational work that spotlights his impressive draftsmanship, including drawings of everyday life in the peacetime US Army in Germany, Gregory’s work soon transitioned to semi-abstracted portraits of jazz musicians, both in black and white and in vivid colors. He moved to full abstraction by the early 1960s, and to large "changeable" sculptural pieces that invited viewers’ participation.

In the 50s and 60s, Gregory developed his signature style of drawing and painting that expressed the interior and exterior of a figure by means of line, without reliance on the edges of form. The result was a curvilinear “abstraction” with little discernable reference to its origin, but energized by the connection to that source.

In the 70s, 80s and 90s, he worked in collage; wide brushstroke acrylic paintings; found-wood sculptures; enamel paintings, and a series of paintings created by spraying a mixture of sand and paint across the canvas on a very low trajectory.

In several series, he attached nautical lines to the surfaces of large canvases – these “drawings” form a low relief that acts as a barrier to the colorful paint “shot” across the canvas. The pigment’s trajectory constitutes the form itself, reinforcing and interacting with the three-dimensional line.

An ingenious experimenter, Gregory turned in the late 80s to the use of quick-drying oil enamels (largely black and white), combined with an alkyd resin. Commenting in 1993 on his enamel work, he explained: “I…found the brush was not direct enough for me. I couldn’t get the immediacy of line that I was looking for.”

To fix that, he developed a pressure-pouring method of applying paint from a rolling bridge seat that moved horizontally across big canvases laid flat. This allowed him “to maintain, and vary, a stream of enamel. I always make a complete work each time, with no changes. If I reject the attempt, the canvas is painted over and used again for a later work. As a result, there are linear, relief-like shapes underneath the final layer of enamel in many of my paintings.”

In 2000, he returned to vivid colors in his paintings, using casein on large and small canvases and in smaller drawings. In this period he continued his built work, creating a striking series of painted reliefs, which combine wooden, cord and metal 3-D elements with dramatic textures and paint colors.

Along with his lifetime of studio work, Gregory had a prize-winning career as a editorial sculptor, including many busts of newsmakers published in Time, Look, Sports Illustrated, The Saturday Review and the Playboy Jazz and Pop Hall of Fame (all photographed by Seymour Mednick), as well as privately commissioned works.Gregory’s work is in many private collections and several museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Portrait Gallery.